Maintenance performance improvement with System Dynamics: A Corrective Maintenance showcase

This paper presents a case study of an analysis of a Corrective Maintenance process to realize performance improvement. The Corrective Maintenance process is supported by SAP, which has indicated the performance realisation problem. System Dynamics is used in a Group Model Building process to structure the problem and to develop a dynamic business model with which the process is analysed. This is performed by the evaluation of changes in external factors and interventions in the process on performance indicators compared to a reference run. The case study has shown that modelling this maintenance performance problem is possible with System Dynamics, but the method is more suitable on an aggregated level. Although the results of this simulation study are significant, one of the conclusions is to not automatically assume that System Dynamics is suitable for problems that are structured with Group Model Building. It is recommended to select another modelling method after the problem is structured, if that method is more suitable